I started checking out flickr just now. I’m still not sure exactly what it is or why it’s cool, but boingboing keeps talking about it so it must be interesting. Anyway, one of the first photos that I saw while browsing around is shown above – taken this morning in Japan. I thought my readers might like it 
. Go here to see it on flickr.
This article in the Sydney Morning Herald provides the best down-to-earth, positive description of what Australia’s ‘multiculturalism’ (i.e. mass immigration from everywhere) is all about, and why it’s a good thing. The quotes from Mr Tanda are the best parts:
“It seems normal here to mix with people from all parts of the world. Our friends are from everywhere – white Australians, also Chinese, Turkish people, Lebanese; you don’t really even notice it after a while.”
Catherine and I just got back from Canberra. She was attending a ‘computer camp’ summer school with APAC at the Australian National University.
I had a wander around the campus and saw some interesting things.
They have a particle accelerator (arranged as a vertical tube housed in the tower you can see):
Also this odd art installation (which is big – much taller than me) which used to be an enormous electromagnetic device of some sort, charging up from mains power for 15 minutes and then dumping that same power out at 900V over two seconds. It was the largest one of its kind (I can’t remember the name of the device – homo-something?) ever built. They used it to power a railgun:
The Miracle Supermarket at the Macquarie Centre stocks a pretty good selection of weird Asian drinks. Not so usual is a Western company making weird drinks and selling them in Asia.
I give you ‘Fanta Lactic’:
It’s really tasty.
At left, a several-year-old modernhumorist.com joke. At right, this weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald, featuring an ad for Telstra’s Bigpond Music.
I first came across smart cars (acronym for Swatch-Mercedes Art, apparently) in Germany in 2000. In the last few months I’ve been seeing them pop up with some regularity in Australia, but seeing one serving as a police car is new:
Here’s one of the first smarts I saw in Germany:
Here’s the extremely odd stacker they kept the cars in, next door to Ikea. I assumed at the time that this was just an expensive advertisement, but later somebody said that the stackers are vending machines, ‘dispensing’ your car (after you insert DM25,000 in coins?):
Going through some old photos I came across one of my favourites. In 2000, I went to the German computer trade show CeBIT; I snapped this photo in one of the dozen or so exhibition halls:
A Sony rep (‘booth babe’) with a Vaio laptop on a stick chatting with two eBay reps.